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From an island to a river
With over 20 years of sales management and leadership experience, I recently left a networking vendor based in the Silicon Valley and decided to join Nile as the Chief Revenue Officer responsible for global sales. It was a tough decision, but the innovation, vision, and culture that I’m experiencing here at Nile confirms that I made the right choice.
While engaged in hundreds of sales opportunities with the previous company, and on the cusp of selling the latest and greatest Wi-Fi and switching technology, it often felt that customers were repeatedly chasing common outcomes but were coming up short.
- Simplified and more efficient operations.
- Future proofing.
- And the opportunity to gain more immediate returns with each purchase.
Purchases were often made due to a business crisis, budget pressure, or the timing of a technology refresh. It’s just the nature of the business and in a sense, part of the problem. There were countless times where customers would get their budget at the end of year, or during a capital project which forced them to end up buying the available product of the moment.
Unfortunately, they often purchased solutions built on legacy technology or standards due to timing (i.e., ending up with Wi-Fi 5 APs versus Wi-Fi 6). The problem was that the customer and all their users were forced to use old technology for 5 or more years!
Here’s where Nile is making a difference. We are the driving force behind a revolutionary approach to next-gen wired and wireless access networks that I have not seen in a long time. We’re integrating 10+ traditionally different product and service components into a single solution that gets to the root of the problem described above – operations purgatory. And we share the responsibility for your network’s success via guaranteed SLAs for Availability, Coverage and Capacity.
Your IT organization maintains ownership of how the network goes together, and Nile handles the daily lifecycle management aspects from Day -1 to Day N, which includes site surveys, installation of the on-premises infrastructure, software upgrades, performance improvements and the handling of operational issues. It’s a game changer!
Because our Nile Access Service is so different from what legacy networking vendors are offering and selling as network-as-a-service (NaaS) there’s a few things IT leaders need to consider:
- The legacy lifecycle model and wasted resources is not working.
- Helping everyone embrace change should be a priority.
- Getting around past budget missteps must be addressed before it hurts you again.
To help, we’ve put together an eBook called Network transformation and today’s hurdles to provide the top 5 tips on how to maneuver a shift from legacy networking to a true next-generation network architecture. In follow-up blogs I’ll go a little deeper into each of the issues described above and what I’m hearing from your peers.
I’d like to leave you with one last point of view. If you’re looking at refreshing a network or building out something new, take the time to consider the lifecycle management aspects you’re dealing with today and what it will take to correct the things we’re all just living with and accept as normal or “business as usual”.
IT organizations have learned to live with constant updates, different refresh cycles for wired and wireless, technologies from the same vendor that don’t really interoperate, delayed projects, and constantly playing catch-up.
It may be time to get off that island, which I hear is in for some interesting weather…
